Hi! I am Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen! Today, we’re going to do Baked Beans. I’ve chosen two cans; these are16 oz. cans of pork and beans. I actually looked at some vegetarian beans and I noticed that the calories on the vegetarian beans were more than the calorie on calories on the pork and beans, so I’ve chosen these pork and beans. It has some pork over the top that was used for flavoring but there was only one gram of fat per serving. But I am going to dip that out because I just prefer not go crush down into that when I am eating the pork and beans. And I don’t worry that at all but what I am going to do is check as I put it into this mixing bowl. So, empty the first can. This can be any brand that you like. I just happen to have these in my pantry and thought this would be a nice vegetable since I don’t have a lot of vegetables posted at this point. Get both of those cans go in here. And I see a little piece of pork here that I am going to dig out. You don’t have to be fanatical about this. You don’t even have to do it at all. It’s just—I do try to watch fat in general and I’d look at the backs of the cans and see what I’m getting. And then if I see something specifically that I don’t want like those chunks of pork, then I just remove them.

I am going to add to these some light brown sugar and this is just a generic kind of brown sugar. And what I want is ½ cup of firmly packed brown sugar. So, that just goes in here. We’ll be mixing all these up, so I don’t have to blend them one at a time. Then, I can cut an onion and you can see how much of it I’ve used. It’s ¼ cup and it’s finely chopped, goes in here. And then, got a couple more things to add about our ketchup here, it looks like but I want just one tablespoon. I am not going to measure because it’s hard to kind of get that out of the tablespoon and hopefully we’ll get about a tablespoon. That looks about right. And then, that can be any brand you want. Also, mustard, any brand you want and for this, shake it up; about a ¼ teaspoon, not too much. You don’t want to have too much of a mustard taste of this, jus about a ¼ teaspoon.

I think we’re going to blend all these together with a spoon. You don’t want to use a mixer or anything like that or you’d have pulverized beans. You want them to hold their shape. You want them to look nice and pretty when it comes out of the oven. This will be baking in a 350° oven and I’m estimating that it’s going to take 30-45 minutes. I’ll be checking on the time for you and be sure and tell you of how long I actually left this for the look that I’ll be coming out with.

So, they’re nicely mixed and you need a dish that is large enough to contain those two cans worth of beans. I am stirring a little here because it just look a little different colored over on one side like maybe there was more brown sugar but I think I’ve got it covered pretty well. So, what I am going to do is place this in the oven and let it cook at 350° for 30 to 45 minutes and then, I will come back and I will have a special topping to show you that I think you’ll be interested in. So, here it goes in the oven and I’ll see you in 30 to 45 minutes.

I’ve been checking on my baked bean every so often and it’s been 40 minutes. I didn’t let them go to 45, although they could have. At 30 minutes, they would have been. All right bringing out the plate just weren’t quite as bubbly and brown as you get right here. So, I am bringing up and putting it on a mat that will protect the counter. And then I’m going to finish them off. So, I’m turning off the oven and getting ready for the following preparations. Before I was as that conscious as I am now and most Americans being the same way, I use to make baked beans by putting three raw strips of bacon on top and then, sticking it in the oven. And that basically just sizzled and fried and the grease went right down into it. It tasted great but it’s just too fatty for my taste anymore. That I sell out the bacon.

So, what I did was to prepare three pieces of bacon. They’re very crisply baked and then, what we’re going to do is crumble those up into fairly large chunks and put them on top. I am not going to stir them in because then they would get soggy and eventually, that will get soggy anyway but we just need to take our fingers and just chunk them up. They should be really crisp so that you’re not putting a lot of excess fat in. You may leave this out entirely if you don’t eat bacon or if you feel like this is adding more fat than you want but I feel like there are some people out there that would enjoy having this much adding flavored adding in and are maybe used to having that in your baked things.

So, this is the final look of the dish. Let me wipe my hands and I will serve some up onto a plate, so you can get a notion of what they’re going to look like when they actually are served. We just dip in, get some of the bacon and some of the beans and put that on a serving plate. It’s extremely hot just coming out of the oven but I might be able to kind of get over here the edge and cool this off a little bit. It has that nice, sweet flavor. The bacon, if I get under that, it’s going to add some salty, bacon flavor. This is a really good recipe and I hope you enjoy it.